First appeared in
Smithsonian Magazine, Volume 18. No. 2, May 1987. Used
with permission of Miss Hamblin's sister and executor,

Mary H. Ovrom.

December 1, 1997. Note added 8/14/07: The
Flood of Noah was likely such a huge world-wide
catastrophe that the site of the Garden of Eden may
presently be buried under miles of sediments.

If the
earth originally had one continent, and the continents
split apart during or after the Flood, then the location
of the Garden in the land of Eden is even more
uncertain.

In recent years several documentary films
have been made which explore the Mesopotamian region for
the possible location of Eden. Old place names, local
legends and folk lore make the ongoing search
interesting. (LTD)

By using an interdisciplinary approach, archaeologist Juris
Zarins believes he's found it - and can pinpoint it for us.

The author, a frequent contributor, met
Dr. Zarins and his Eden theory when writing of Saudi archaeology
(September 1983) and has followed his work since.

"And the Lord God planted a garden
eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed"

(Genesis 2:8).

Then the words become quite specific:

"And a river went out of Eden to
water the garden; and from thence it was parted, and became into
four heads. The name of the first is Pison: that is it which
compasseth the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold; And
the gold of that land is good: there is bdellium and the onyx
stone.

And the name of the second river is
Gihon: the same is it that compasseth the whole land of
Ethiopia. And the name of the third river is Hiddekel [Tigris]:
that is it which goeth toward the east of Assyria. And the
fourth river is Euphrates".

(Genesis 2:10-14).

But where now are the
Pison and the
Gihon? And where, if indeed it existed as a geographically specific
place, was the Garden of Eden?

Theologians, historians, ordinary
inquisitive people and men of science have tried for centuries to
figure it out. Eden has been "located" in as many diverse areas as
has lost Atlantis.

Some early Christian fathers and late classical
authors suggested it could lie in Mongolia or India or Ethiopia.

They based their theories quite sensibly
on the known antiquity of those regions, and on the notion that the
mysterious Pison and Gihon were to be associated with those other
two great rivers of the ancient world, the Nile and the Ganges.

The area thought to
be the Garden of Eden,

which was flooded
when Gulf waters arose, is shown in green.
Yellow areas of Bahrain and Arabian coast represent Dilmun,

paradise land of
Ubaidians and Sumerians

Another favorite locale for the Garden
had been Turkey, because both the Tigris and the Euphrates rise in
the mountains there, and because Mount Ararat, where Noah's Ark came
to rest, is there.

In the past hundred years. since the
discovery of ancient civilizations in modern Iraq, scholars have
leaned toward the Tigris-Euphrates valley in general, and to the
sites of southern Sumer, about 150 miles north of the present head
of the Persian Gulf, in particular (map, above).

To this southern Sumerian theory Dr. Juris Zarins, of Southwest
Missouri State University in Springfield, would murmur:

"You're getting warmer. For Dr.
Zarins, who has spent seven years working out his own
hypothesis, believes that the Garden of Eden lies presently
under the waters of the Persian Gulf, and he further believes
that
the story of Adam and Eve in-and especially out-of the
Garden is a highly condensed and evocative account of perhaps
the greatest revolution that ever shook mankind: the shift from
hunting-gathering to agriculture."

No single scholarly discipline will
suffice to cover the long, intricate road Zarins has followed to
arrive at his theory.

He began, as many another researcher
has, with the simple Biblical account, which,

"I read forward and backward, over
and over again."

To this he added the unfolding
archaeology of Saudi Arabia (SMITHSONIAN, September 1983), where he
spent his field time for more than a decade.

Next he consulted the sciences of
geology, hydrology and linguistics from a handful of brilliant
20th-century scholars and, finally, Space Age technology in the form
of LANDSAT space images.

It is a tale of rich complexity, beginning 30 millennia before the
birth of Christ. Of climatic shifts from moist to arid to moist,
with consequent migrations eddying back and forth across, and up and
down the Middle East. And of myriad peoples. There were
hunter-gatherers whom agriculturists displaced.

There were prehistoric Ubaidians who
built cities, Sumerians who invented writing and the Assyrians who
absorbed Sumer's writing as well as its legend of a luxuriantly
lovely land, an Eden called Dilmun.

Finally there were Kashshites in
Mesopotamia, contemporaries of the Israelites then forming the state
of Israel.

An endless
search for food
There are two crucial if approximate dates in reconstruction.

The first is about 30,000 B.C., with the
transition from Neanderthal to modern Man. This, some
anthropologists believe, took place along the eastern shore of the
Mediterranean and Aegean seas and in Iraq. At that time the Great
Ice Age still held most of Eurasia in its grip, and it caused the
sea levels to fall by 400 feet so that what is now the Persian Gulf
was dry land, all the way to the Strait of Hormuz.

It was irrigated not only by the
still-existing Tigris and Euphrates but also by the Gihon, the Pison
and their tributaries from the Arabian peninsula and from Iran. It
seems reasonable that technologically primitive but modern Mm, in
his endless search for food, would have located the considerable
natural paradise that presented itself in the area where the Gulf
now lies.

But Eden wasn't born then. That came, Zarins believes, about 6000
B.C. In between 30,000 and 6000 B.C., the climate varied.

From 15,000 B.C., rainfall diminished
drastically. Faced with increasing aridity, the Paleolithic
population retreated, some as far as the area known to us as the
"Fertile Crescent" (north along the Tigris and Euphrates, westward
toward the moist Mediterranean coast, south to the Nile), and also
eastward to the Indus River valley.

Others, perhaps wearied by the long
trek, made do with the more austere conditions of central Arabia and
continued foraging as best they could.

Then, at about 6000 to 5000 B.C., following a long arid stretch,
came a period called the Neolithic Wet Phase when rains returned to
the Gulf region. The reaches of eastern and northeastern Saudi
Arabia and southwestern Iran became green and fertile again.

Foraging populations came back to where
the four rivers now ran full, and there was rainfall on the
intervening plains. Animal bones indicate that in this period Arabia
had abundant game. Thousands of stone tools suggest intensive, if
seasonal, human occupation around now dry lakes and rivers.

These tools are found even in the Rub
al-Khali or Empty Quarter of Saudi Arabia. And so about 6000 to 5000
B.C. the land was again a paradise on Earth, provided by a bountiful
nature-God - and admirably suited to the foraging life.

This time, however, there was a difference: agriculture had been
invented.

Not overnight.

"It was a very gradual process, not
an event," Zarins emphasizes.

It grew up along the Mediterranean coast
and in today's Iran and Iraq as groups of hunter-gatherers evolved
in-to agriculturists. Foragers from central Arabia, returning to the
southern Mesopotamian plain, found it already resettled by these
agriculturists.

Because the process occurred before
writing was invented, there is no record of what upheavals the
evolution caused, what tortured questions about traditional values
and life-styles, what dislocations of clans or tribes.

Zarins posits that it must have been far
more dramatic than the infinitely later Industrial Revolution, and
an earthquake in comparison with today's computer-age
discombobulation of persons, professions and systems.

"What would happen to a forager when
his neighbors changed their ways or when he found agriculturists
had moved into his territory? Zarins asks. These agriculturists
were innovative folk who had settled down, planted seeds,
domesticated and manipulated animals.

They made the food come to them, in
effect, instead of chasing it over hill and dale.

What would the forager do if he
couldn't cope? He could die; lie could move on; he could join
the agriculturists. But whatever happened, he would resent it."

Eden, Adam,
and the birth of writing

The crunch came, Zarins believes, here in the Tigris and Euphrates
valleys and in northern Arabia, where the hunter-gatherers, flooding
in from less hospitable regions, were faced with more technically
accomplished humans who knew how to breed and raise animals, who
made distinctive pottery, who seemed inclined to cluster in settled
groups.

Who were these people?

Zarins believes they were a southern
Mesopotamian group and culture now called
the Ubaid. They founded
the oldest of the southern Mesopotamian cities, Eridu, about 5000
B.C.

Though Eridu, and other cities like Ur
and Uruk, were discovered a century ago, the Ubaidian presence down
along the coast of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia has been known for little
more than a decade, when vestiges of their settlements, graves and
distinctive pottery turned up.

It was in Saudi Arabia that Zarins encountered the Ubaidians, and
there that he began developing his hypothesis about the true meaning
of the Biblical Eden. One clue lies in linguistics: the term Eden,
or Edin, appears first in Sumer, the Mesopotamian region that
produced the world's first written language. This was in the third
millennium B.C., more than three thousand years after the rise of
the Ubaid culture.

In Sumerian the word "Eden" meant simply
"fertile plain." The word "Adam" also existed in cuneiform, meaning
something like "settlement on the plain." Although both words were set down first
in Sumerian, along with place names like Ur and Uruk, they are not
Sumerian in origin. They are older.

A brilliant Assyriologist named
Benno Landsberger advanced the theory in 1943 that these
names were all linguistic remnants of a pre-Sumerian people who had
already named rivers, cities-and even some specific trades like
potter anti coppersmith-before the Sumerians appeared.

Landsberger called the pre-Sumerian language simply Proto-Euphratian.
Other scholars suggest that its speakers were the Ubaidians. However
it was, the existing names were incorporated into Sumerian and
written down for the first time.

And the mythology of the lush and lovely
spot called Eden was codified by being written.

"The whole Garden of Eden story,
however, when finally written, could be seen to represent the
point of view of the hunter gatherers," Zarins reasons.

"It was the result of tension
between the two groups, the collision of two ways of life. Adam
and Eve were heirs to natural bounty. They had everything they
needed. But they sinned and were expelled.

How did they sin? By challenging
God's very omnipotence. In so doing they represented the
agriculturists, the upstarts who insisted on taking matters into
their own hands, relying upon their knowledge and their own
skills rather than on His bounty.

There were no journalists around to record the tension, no
historians. But the event did not go unnoticed. It became a part
of collective memory and at long last it was written down,
highly condensed, in Genesis. It was very brief, but brevity
doesn't mean lack of significance."

How did it happen that an advanced
people would perpetuate a myth making their own ancestors the
sinners?

It may be that the Ubaidians, who are
known to have sailed down the east coast of Arabia and colonized
there, ran into descendants of foragers displaced from a drowning
Eden, from them heard the awful story of the loss of paradise and
repeated it until it became their own legend.

Or it may be that,
responding to the increasing pressures and stresses of a society
growing in complexity, they found comfort in a fantasy of the good
old days, when life had been sweeter, simpler, more idyllic.

However, it was a tale firmly
established in Ubaidian mythology, then adopted and recorded by the
Sumerians.

LANDSAT spots
a "fossil river"
At this stage in his thesis, Zarins goes back to geography and
geology to pinpoint the area of Eden where he believes the collision
came to a head.

The evidence is beguiling: first,
Genesis was written from a Hebrew point of view.

It says the Garden
was "eastward," i.e., east of Israel. It is quite specific about the
rivers. The Tigris and the Euphrates are easy because they still
flow. At the time Genesis was written, the Euphrates must have been
the major one because it stands identified by name only and without
an explanation about what it "compasseth."

The Pison can be identified from the
Biblical reference to the land of Havilah, which is easily located
in the Biblical Table of Nations (Genesis 10:7, 25:18) as relating
to localities and people within a Mesopotamian-Arabian framework.

Supporting the Biblical evidence of
Havilah are geological evidence on the ground and LANDSAT images
from space. These images clearly show a "fossil river," that once
flowed through northern Arabia and through the now dry beds, which
modern Saudis and Kuwaitis know as the Wadi Riniah and the Wadi
Batin.

Furthermore, as the Bible says, this
region was rich in bdellium, an aromatic gum resin that can still be
found in north Arabia, and gold, which was still mined in the
general area in the 1950s.

It is the Gihon, which "compasseth the
whole land of Ethiopia," that has been the problem.

In Hebrew the geographical reference was
to "Gush" or "Kush." The translators of the King James Bible in the
17th century rendered Gush or Kush as "Ethiopia" - which is further
to the south and in Africa - thus upsetting the geographical
applecart and flummoxing researchers for centuries.

Zarins now believes the Gihon is the
Karun River, which rises in Iran and flows southwesterly toward the
present Gulf.

The Karun also shows in LANDSAT images
and was a perennial river which, until it was dammed, contributed
most of the sediment forming the delta at the head of the Persian
Gulf.

Thus the Garden of Eden, on the geographical evidence, must have
been somewhere at the head of the Gulf at a time when all four
rivers joined and flowed through an area that was then above the
level of the Gulf.

The wording in Genesis that Eden's river
came into four heads" was dealt with by Biblical scholar Ephraim
Speiser some years ago:

the passage, he said, refers to the
four rivers upstream of their confluence into the one river
watering the Garden. This is a strange perspective, but
understandable if one reflects that the description is of a folk
memory, written millennia after the events encapsulated, by men
who had never been within leagues of the territory.

It was Speiser again who suggested that
the mysterious Gush or Kush should be correctly written as Kashshu
and further that it refers to
the Kashshites, a people who, in about
1500 B.C., conquered Mesopotamia and prevailed until about 900 B.C.

This Zarins considers a vital clue.

"At the time the Kashshites were in
control in Mesopotamia, the nation of Israel was being formed.
The Hebrews must certainly have encountered them, and learned
the handed-down traditions of early Mesopotamia, the myths and
tales. They must have heard the words Eden and Adam."

The name Eve does not appear in Sumerian
but there is a most intriguing link - the account of Eve's having
been fashioned from Adam's rib in the Garden story.

Why a rib?

Well, in a famous Sumerian poem
translated and analyzed by scholar Samuel Noah Kramer, there is an
account of how Enki the water god angered the Mother Goddess
Ninhursag by eating eight magical plants that she had created. The
Mother Goddess put the curse of death on Enki and disappeared,
presumably so she couldn't change her mind and relent.

Later, however, when Enki became very
ill and eight of his "organs" failed, Ninhursag was enticed back.
She summoned eight healing deities, one for each ailing organ. Now
the Sumerian word for "rib" is "ti.," but the same word also means
"to make live."

So the healing deity who worked on
Enki's rib was called "Nin-ti" and, in a nice play on words, became
both the "lady of the rib" and the "lady who makes live." This
Sumerian pun didn't translate into Hebrew, in which the words for
"rib" and "to make live" are quite different.

But the rib itself went into the
Biblical account and as "Eve" came to symbolize the "mother of all
living."

This and other ties with Sumerian myth are very clear, and Zarins
finds it telling that although the Hebrews had close associations
with Egypt, their earliest spiritual roots were in Mesopotamia.

"Abraham journeyed to Egypt, Joseph
journeyed to Egypt, the whole Exodus story is concerned with
Egypt, but there is nothing whatever Egyptian about the early
chapters of Genesis," he points out.

"All these early accounts are linked
to Mesopotamia. Abraham indeed is said to have come from Ur, at
the time near the Gulf, and the writers of Genesis wanted to
link up with that history.

So they drew from the literary
sources of the greatest civilization that had existed, and that
was in Mesopotamia. In so doing they turned Eden into the
Garden, Adam into a man, and a compacted history of things that
occurred millennia before was pressed into a few chapters."

Long before Genesis was written, Zarins
believes, the physical Eden had vanished under the waters of the
Gulf.

Man had lived happily there. But then,
about 5000 to 4000 B.C. came a worldwide phenomenon called the
Flandrian Transgression, which caused a sudden rise in sea level.
The Gulf began to fill with water and actually reached its
modern-day level about 4000 B.C., having swallowed Eden and all the
settlements along the coastline of the Gulf. But it didn't stop
there.

It kept right on rising, moving upward
into the southern legions of today's Iraq and Iran.

"The Sumerians always claimed that
their ancestors came 'out of the sea,' and I believe they
literally did," says Zarins. "They retreated northward into
Mesopotamia from the encroaching waters of the Gulf, where they
had lived for thousands of years."

Their original "Eden" was gone but a new
one called Dilmun, on higher ground along the eastern coast of
Arabia, enters the epics and the poems in the third millennium i.e.

The by then ancient mythology of a land
of plenty, of eternal life and peace, had lodged firmly in the
collective mind and in a specific geographical area.

The scholarly world first heard about Dilmun a little more than a
century ago, when scholars were able to decipher cuneiform tablets
unearthed by archaeologist Austen Henry Layard in Nineveh, an
Assyrian stronghold in today's Iraq. Its earliest mention was in
economic texts referring to traffic in people and goods. On later
tablets, to their astonishment.

Scholars began reading, in literature,
not only about Eden and Adam and the "lady of the rib" but also
about a Great Flood, a Sumerian hero called
Gilgamesh and his search
for the Tree of Life. There was even a serpent.

Gilgamesh had gone "down" from Sumer to
the Gulf area where he had been told he would find a plant that
would give him eternal life.

"What he found may have been coral,
which in antiquity was a symbol of eternal life," Zarins
explains.

"And after his labors he went to
sleep and a serpent came along and stole his eternal life - his
coral, maybe. Now it may not have been a serpent as we think of
one, but instead one of those beautiful feathery creatures that
Assyrians depicted in reliefs.

But the descriptions of Dilmun are
of an area that fits what I've been saying, where societies
could exist at the will and bounty of God, in a beautiful
setting."

A land for
commerce and consecration

There is a curious dichotomy in Dilmun as economic center and also
as hallowed place of legend. Its exact location has been a debated
issue.

It is Zarins' - and most scholars' -
conviction that it was the islands of Bahrain and Failaka and the
eastern coast of Saudi Arabia.

"The island of Bahrain was the Hong
Kong of its era," lie says, "a rich hub of international trade,
with ships coming and going between Mesopotamia and the Indus
Valley civilization.

Both there and on the eastern coast
of Saudi Arabia are tens of thousands of tumuli - far more than
the sparse indigenous population would have accounted for-some
very rich tombs, most dating to the period 2500 to 1900 B.C.

Some suggest close ties with the Sumerians. Eden was gone so
they would want to go to the paradise land of Dilmun either for
pilgrimages or as the site of their final resting place. After
all, if riches or eternal life were to be had in this area, they
might as well get in on it."

One final question must be asked.

Why, when the Israelites accepted the
ancient stories of Mesopotamia-Arabia, with all their freight of
long-forgotten struggles, climatic changes, half-forgotten
traditions, did they choose the word Eden instead of Dilmun?

"Perhaps they never heard of the
word Dilmun," says Zarins. "We don't really know. Archaeologist
Daniel Potts is working on that problem right now.

Did the word Dilmun exist in Hellenistic times? There was a
linguistic break in Alexander the Great's time. The wedgelike
cuneiform was replaced by the alphabetic writing of the Greeks,
a much more efficient system. Power passed from the East to the
West, to Greece and Rome.

The old stories, the old words,
faded into obscurity because power goes to those who have it.
Until the discovery of the Nineveh tablets, Assyrian cuneiform
was dead. Early translators never heard of it.

The name and concept of Eden were
transmitted not through the Sumerian language of Dilmun but
through the Hebrew-Hellenistic one of Eden."

It is an accident of history, of
archaeology, of translation, perhaps, that Dilmun was lost and Eden
remained. It should not shake the faith of any intelligent human
being.

If Zarins is correct, there is embedded
in the Bible a very ancient folk memory, not only the story of
Creation but also the story of Man's emergence from total dependence
to perilous self-reliance, with all the man-made dangers incipient
therein.